Ending The Search For Malaysia Air Flight 370 Could Help Solve The Mystery

Christine Negroni
, ContributorI write about the business of aviation and travel.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

9M-MRO the plane that flew as MH370. Photo by Jay Davis

After nearly three years of uncertainty, the decision this week to call off the sea search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 37o could be the just the thing to find out what really happened to the missing plane.

Considering that 74 thousand square miles of the South Indian Ocean have been scanned at a cost of more than $120 million, it seems counter-intuitive, but what has been needed for a long time is for the investigation to take a broader view.

Since March 8, 2014, when the Boeing 777 made an inexplicable change of course off its planned path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew into oblivion with 239 people on board, officials have pinned their hopes on finding the plane and the cockpit voice and flight data recorders. It has always been a Quixotic task.

Even a widebody airliner is minuscule in an ocean of 28 million square miles with an average depth of two and a half miles. Ratchet up the enormity of the task by considering that the plane likely came apart in the air before hitting the sea in a widely scattered rain of shards. Now, how likely is the possibility of finding two boxes the size of a breadbox, only one of which is even likely to be illuminating?

Why then has the entire investigation become tied to this one effort?

Engineers at Inmarsat were able to determine the general direction of MH 370. Photo credit: Christine Negroni

The most promising information about the loss of Malaysia 370 came from unexpected sources. There is the satellite transmission that showed the plane flew on until it ran out of fuel. More recently that data also led to the conclusion that the plane was in such a high-speed descent at the end, it fractured before hitting the sea.

When a piece of the airplane’s right wing, called a flaperon, washed up on a beach, an examination effectively ruled out the popular theory that whoever was piloting the flight was intentionally trying to make a controlled landing, an action associated with a criminal or terrorist act.

That only these bits of information have emerged despite the enormous number of clues available from maintenance records and prior similar events tells me that fixating on the black boxes has distracted investigators from clues that can be illuminating.